Friday marks the third anniversary of the election of the Trudeau government, almost exactly one year to the fixed date election next Oct. 21.

With a year remaining in the Liberals’ mandate, we are in effect entering a permanent campaign. There’s even less time remaining for the Liberals to move legislation through the House and Senate, since, when they rise next June for the summer, this Parliament will not sit again.

It’s interesting to compare the Liberals’ performance in government with their promises on the campaign trail in 2015, when they began the election in third place in the polls, and finished in first with a majority government.

The non-partisan Trudeau Meter website lists 230 Liberal campaign promises, of which it says 79 have been achieved, 68 are in progress, and 41 are broken.

The most conspicuous broken promise is electoral reform, after Trudeau famously pledged that 2015 would be “the last federal election using first-past-the-post.”

That didn’t go very well. When a special committee recommended a referendum on an unspecified form of proportional representation, the opposition parties were united behind it, but the government blew it off. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau threw Maryam Monsef, the minister responsible at the time, under the bus and instructed her replacement, Karina Gould, in her mandate letter that she wasn’t to do anything on electoral reform.

So, first-past-the-post (or FPTP, as it’s known) is still the name of the game, a system that served the Liberals very well in 2015 and may again next year: Tuesday’s weekly Nanos poll had the Liberals close to majority territory at 37 per cent, the Conservatives at 31 per cent, the NDP at 16 per cent and the Greens at seven per cent.

Another broken promise was related to the fiscal framework. The Liberals said they would run stimulative deficits of $10 billion in their first two years in office, before returning to balance in 2019. They’re nowhere near that. Deficits have run as high as $30 billion, and there’s no talk of a balanced budget before 2022. The 2018 budget predicted cumulative deficits of nearly $100 billion between now and then. Instead, the Liberals have introduced the argument that Canada’s share of debt-to-GDP has declined slightly to about 31 per cent, the lowest in the G7, on its way down to 28 per cent by 2022.

On the upside, the Canadian economy has created 600,000 jobs since the Liberals took office, with unemployment falling from 7.1 to 5.9 per cent. Yes, yes; jobs for the middle class, and those working hard to join them.

Among the promises kept is the legalization of marijuana, introduced with incredibly heavy coverage in the news media. The Globe and Mail and the National Post offered their readers five and four pages of coverage, respectively, in their weekend editions, and the networks all offered hour-long specials leading up to Wednesday’s legalization date. The two national dailies were at it Wednesday, devoting their entire front pages to the story. “Day 1” proclaimed the Globe headline, turning to six pages of coverage inside. “OPEN FOR BUSINESS, READY OR NOT,” shouted the Post on its front, with three more pages in the front section.

During the implementation phase in the coming months, there will be no shortage of coverage, because the cannabis story is complicated. While the enabling legislation is federal, the administration of justice is a provincial jurisdiction. And municipalities, constitutional creatures of the provinces, also have something to say about where it may be consumed. Municipalities don’t want people toking up in parks and playgrounds, or near schoolyards, and in most such places, both cigarettes and pot will be banned.

First, there’s the matter of minimum age: It’s 18 in Alberta and Quebec and 19 in the other provinces. The incoming right-wing government of François Legault is making noises about raising it to 21. The points of sale will also vary by province. Quebec will have 30 government-run stores, but only three on the Island of Montreal. Ontario will sell only online, pending the opening of private stores in the spring.

Then there’s drugged driving, and whether the police are confident in the saliva tests that are the equivalent of breathalyzer tests for driving under the influence of alcohol. The police themselves will face different thresholds for their own use of recreational cannabis: The RCMP and OPP have to abstain for 28 days, while in Quebec, officers are told only to report “fit for duty.”

One thing everyone agrees on: If you’re crossing the border into the U.S., don’t have any cannabis on your person or in your luggage, but if asked whether you use it, simply tell the truth.

The devil is in the details of all this, and there’s a lot that can go wrong.

One thing the Liberals don’t need in the run-up to an election is a rollout that looks like amateur hour. While about two-thirds of Canadians support legalization, a messy legal debut could raise the question of why Ottawa didn’t take more time to get it right.

In the Prime Minister’s Office, they don’t want to be sitting around a conference room one morning with someone asking why they were in such a hurry.

The answer is very simple: promise kept.

So begins the election campaign.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

More from iPolitics

X

Join the conversation. It gets feisty!

Author

L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy. He is the author of six books. He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94.